


Men of Winter

by arianrhod



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-21
Updated: 2011-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-15 20:11:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arianrhod/pseuds/arianrhod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone digs too deeply and Richard starts a relationship that requires no digging at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Men of Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [acaramelmacchiato](https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/gifts).



> Warning: Very vague allusions to child abuse.

“You look like you don’t belong.”

Richard was still brushing the crumblings of dead leaves off the elbows of his jacket when the bitter honey drawl came spiriting towards him from the shadowed corner of the cell. It was not a voice common to the gaol, sounding even less anything like the cadence and lilt of the Riverside clip.

He didn’t permit himself to study the shadows in vain for a face, instead returning to his idly fastidious brushing. “And you don’t sound like you belong either,” Richard returned, without accent or intonation of interest.

The shadows produced a languid chuckle that tapered to a rasping wheeze before they were stifled. Richard moved on to straightening his doublet; it was heavy as befit that last of the fine fall days where the air bit with the portent of winter, but it was likewise unembroidered as befit a swordsman who partied on the Hill, ate, danced, drank and loved but did not sleep on the Hill. He thought about his bed with a brief bit of wistfulness as he sat carefully on the clean bench opposite the talking shadow.

He should have gone from cleaning his person to stretching his body. As the year turned colder, it was more important for Richard to keep himself warm and flexible but since it was a talking patrician shadow he shared a cell with, he felt it necessary to refrain from limbering up right at the moment. A noble would surely know of St. Vier, so obviously St. Vier had to preserve a little bit of his mystery--swordsman’s pride--if only by maintaining the myth that St. Vier never needed to prepare for a fight or, Crescent forbid it, cool down afterward.

Richard was confident he could wait out the voice from the corner, but the moment he heard a slow intake of breath, prelude to speech, the frankly adolescent Second Captain of the Guard came crashing into the holding cell in the process of unlocking the barred door. Despite his jumbled and horribly respectful addresses to Richard--poor lad had probably never escorted a swordsman to a magistrate’s hearing--Richard likewise cursed him for the interruption. There were few enough surprises in life that Richard was not prepared for, he had really enjoyed thinking that voice was a small piece of a larger, more contradictory and unexpected shape.

A noble for the magistrate’s court?

But Richard was already being herded--very respectfully--to the hallway leading down to the Chambers, and it seemed the voice would never amount to more than ten words. Yet after the door clattered shut behind the Second Captain, Richard could swear he heard a final sullen phrase from the back corner.

“Well, this isn’t any fun anymore.”  
***

“Mr. St Vier, before the magistrate for the death of William Andover, house swordsmen of Lord and Lady Billingsley, last night at the Billingsley’s estate, seven o’clock in the evening. Will Mr. St Vier stand for identification?”

Richard stood and faced the magistrate as he had done four or five times before. The magistrate himself was an unaccountably reasonable minor nobleman who seemed satisfied by the power he held within these four walls. He had acquitted Richard quickly at each previous hearing; Richard expected he’d be done here with plenty of time to spare before the Tremontaine garden party, where he had agreed the night before to meet the young Lord Westly.

Richard sat back down and half-listened as the magistrate read the relevant laws, charges and levels of punishment. He found himself rather more absorbed in trying to remember whether he had talked to Westly before or after Andover had jumped him two hours in advance of the agreed-upon duel. After, then, it must have been after. Richard had agreed to wound Andover theatrically about a half hour after most of the party guests would be gone—more of a private duel--but instead the man had drawn his blade while Richard was picking over the delicately mysterious hors d’oeuvres. Andover had attacked with such fervor that Richard had been forced to wound him mortally. It had been a sloppy fight and Richard had been ashamed that it had happened so publicly, but Westly’s attentions had given him back some confidence in the aftermath.

“Your mother was Martha Humphrey from the South Soldier’s End and your father the last Lord St Vier of City North, it says here?”

Richard would have continued to only half-listen to the magistrate’s catalogue of evidence and procedure and what else, but he’d never been able to half-hear the names of his past never spoken aloud for nearly ten years.

“It says where?” Richard answered in a daze, confused that he hadn’t heard anything leading up to these startling facts and horrified that anywhere in The City they had been said on public record. He was so shocked he tried to stand, wanting to steady himself in the guard position that usually made him feel like he was in control. Unfortunately, the guards that flanked him pressed down on his shoulders, keeping him seated. Richard realized he was squirming under their grip, something he never did, but it seemed like he was moving farther and farther away from his body.

“I’m sorry, this evidence has been submitted to the court under sanctioned anonymity.”

So it was a noble who had done it, set a man to research his past, pull up names that had been blacked from the Book of Nobility and names that had lain for decades in the bilge water behind the prostitute houses at the bottom of the Soldier’s End. If he could have seen the black splotches that clouded his vision, he might have seen the name of Billingsley written in red.

“It says here that you were raised in City North until you were ten, when record appears of your presence in your mother’s brothel The Scarlett Mask, closed these five years. The St Vier estate went to the holdings of the Greenhill Chancellor for logging and farm expansion when you were eight, there is a certification of death for Martha Humphrey for the year ACN 29 when you were sixteen, with permission for her body to be sent North.”

Richard was staring at the wooden paneling above the head of the magistrate’s desk, carved with the Scroll-and-Moon pattern of The City Governed. One part of him managed a bit of amazement that anyone had been able to discover much about him; his life had been so carefully kept off the public record, out of the public eye, behind locked doors that did not open to keys. Yet another part of him could marvel, however, that there were still so many holes in the story, that if someone cared to tell the story at all they would not wonder why a boy went from estate to whorehouse with so many years unremarked.

“I read here that you are illiterate.”

“I-- Does that--” Richard tried to protest, stutter out something about the indignity of this hearing, but without knowing why this was happening now, why his noble patron had not shown up or been already present to exonerate his champion bought and paid for, he felt more helpless than he’d been in his life. Which “it says here” was more helpless than Richard ever wanted to admit.

“Strange for a young man--possibly, the signs point to illigitemacy--to be raised with a keen sense for violence but without the ability to read.” The magistrate was looking straight at Richard now; Richard could tell, even though he had fixed his dull gaze on a particular twist of the scroll design on the wall and would not return the stare.

“Please stop,” Richard said before he had even given himself permission to speak, let alone beg in quite such a pathetic timbre. His vision had started to flicker, walls closing in around him like the cage he’d once been accustomed to, the hands pressing his shoulders down like the warning before the first blow landed, the sound of his own voice, his own voice begging now just like it did then, the whisper of the helpless.

“Stop this hearing at once!” At first, the angry and imperious command was his father, the swinging door heralding pain, but no pain came this time and the door did not shut to darkness and lock before Richard was fed. This time there was an easy, rote discussion between magistrate and the dramatically tardy Lord Hampton, claiming patronage and noble clemency.

In less than a few seconds, the magistrate removed the matter to the Council of Five Lords, hearing the conflict of landed interest. The hands bearing down on Richard were now lifting him from his chair, restoring to him cloak and sword, pushing Richard out into the chilly fall afternoon while Richard himself remained inside, a small boy alone in dark room where he was certain everyone had forgotten him.

***

“That’s because you’re an cotton-brained arse who can’t tell the pointy end of your sword from a fork on your dinner table!”

The honey drawl was coming from around the corner of a dark Riverside alley where Richard would normally not have been caught dead or alive in the evening, especially when he was supposed to be at a garden party with an attractively rich young nobleman. But he’d been stumbling around the lower streets for hours now, entering a familiar pub only to leave directly, passing by familiar faces without the ability to recognize them. He felt nauseous every time he got too close to the north bridge running up to The Hill, and he felt sick every time someone called from a window or a doorway after him, wondering how the Andover fight had gone. The temperature had dropped precipitously when the sun had gone down, and the piles of dead leaves were growing frost around their edges.

The drawl gave him a hook, even better an anchor, to the time before the hearing when he was himself as casually in control as the voice sounded. He took a turn around the corner, finally following the voice through the shadows to the place where it lay.

What he found was not a honeyed face to go with the slippery, sugary tongue but rather an awkward and towering academic--the student robes were conspicuous--pushed up against a wall beyond a group of thieves and their ladies-for-the-night around a fire. The swordsmen John Taim had the taller man by the throat with one hand and was pulling out his blade with the other, doubtless to match wits with force, the only ready strength Taim had though it was not prodigious.

Richard was across the alley in a second and easily found the pressure points on the man’s neck that caused him to drop his blade and the boy--he was a boy really, probably the same age as Richard himself with half the experience--all at once. Taim took one look at Richard and went grumbling off, not eager to make the work of a drunken moment into his death on Richard’s blade.

The academic looked at Richard with just slightly less fear than he had looked at Taim, but his mocking eyes revealed that he knew Richard from the holding cell. Richard stretched out one of his hands, palm up and empty, while he studied the boy’s face closer. His slender, hunched frame was mirrored in the fine, delicate structure of his face. His white skin was marred by neither sun nor weather; he had not been away from his books for long.

Thin fingers were shaking hard when the boy finally worked up enough courage to reach out towards Richard.

“I don’t care why you were in that cell,” the boy said a little to fiercely, as if it meant more to Richard than it did.

“I don’t care why you were there either,” Richard said, unsure of why he would say that. It seemed to matter though.

He tugged on the boy’s hand, drawing them both out of the alley. It had begun to snow, not the dusty flakes of early fall but the fat and fluttery chunks of snow that meant _now it begins_. Hand in hand, they made their way through to Richard’s rooms to hide from the storm.


End file.
